National Short Film Competition

Experimental cinema has no particular tradition in Romania. A little bit of everything has been done, always at the limit of ideology, and under the threat of either the political censorship of the communist period, or of the economic censorship of capitalism. But the lack of shared aesthetic interests, that is, of a tradition held together by several people at once for a certain amount of time, does not mean an absent history, but a difficult, capricious one that is incapable of repetition, that escapes keywords and, above all, generalizations. That's how it was with Ion Grigorescu, so will it be with Radu Jude. No wonder no one wrote that history. The present is at least as difficult: this selection of eleven films, belonging to filmmakers from two generations, does not seem to have much in common – sometimes it’s the subject, other times a form, but not a shared way of understanding cinema. Which is wonderful: we may not have a New Wave, but we will have a lot of experimental cinema, more and even more. And who is to say that the lack of tradition cannot also become a tradition in itself? (Călin Boto)